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A Dynamic Optimal Pilot Design Method for OFDM Systems

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Abstract

Wireless communication systems are increasingly adopting orthogonal frequency division multiplexing to enable high data rate transmission. Such systems employ pilot symbols to estimate wireless channels. While pilot symbols facilitate channel acquisition, they consume part of bandwidth, which in turn reduces spectral efficiency. In this paper, a new pilot design method with virtual subcarriers is proposed. The pilots can be dynamic designed with the previous bit error rate (BER) and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The BER sectioned is utilized as the performance metric for the optimization of the total number of pilots. And then the proposed scheme maximizes a simple function relevant to SNR strategy based on the allocation of pilot locations. So the dynamic pilot design will optimize the total number and locations jointly and offer the potential of enhancing data rate while maintaining the quality of service in time-varying wireless channels. Comparing with the conventional pilot design which is commonly used in many protocols, the proposed scheme is more robust to the channel state, which could make good trade-off between data transmission efficiency and channel estimate accuracy.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61104005, by Natural Science Foundation of Hebei Province under Grant No. F2011501052, by Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China under Grant No. 20110042120015.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer and Communication Engineering, Northeastern University at Qinhuangdao, Qinhuangdao ,  066004, P.R. China

    Yinghua Han, Jinkuan Wang & Qiang Zhao

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  1. Yinghua Han
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  2. Jinkuan Wang
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  3. Qiang Zhao
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Correspondence to Yinghua Han.

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Han, Y., Wang, J. & Zhao, Q. A Dynamic Optimal Pilot Design Method for OFDM Systems. Circuits Syst Signal Process 33, 3621–3634 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-014-9804-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-014-9804-7

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